Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses competing accounts of the creation of the world of Hamtai speakers in Papua New Guinea and what lies hidden, but imagined, beneath the surface – collectively an Imaginarium of the Hamtai world – and what Hamtai speakers insist is of value.

Paper long abstract:

The speakers of the Hamtai language of the Aseki-Menyamya and Bulolo Districts of Papua New Guinea have no single account of the creation of the world, but a myriad of micro accounts in which an ancestor of each narrator meets a First Explorer – usually an Australian or German gold prospector, the Administrator of German New Guinea himself, or an ‘Australian High Commissioner’. The First Explorer, despite not speaking Hamtai language, recognises the narrator’s ancestor dominion over the land as far as the eye can see and what is underneath it. Unfortunately, his photographic proof and his map have been hidden in Canberra or Canada or Germany for many years, which explains why the narrator and his group still live in a remote and underdeveloped area.

The accounts take the form of oral history, handwritten manuscripts, type-written and word-processed documents and letters, to collectively form an Imaginarium of the Hamtai world. What lies beneath is both sacred and secret, but it is imaginable and accessible in mystical ways: in dreams, by shamans, and in modern times by exploration geologists. Mining companies have (obviously) come to the Hamtai land to reveal what lies below: riches that will at last be shared with the owners of the land.

The paper discusses what Hamtai speakers insist is of value, as revealed by their own accounts, what is missing, and what contemporary Papua New Guineans and, indeed, anthropologists might learn from them.